Social Interactions Affecting Web Search Ranking
For the longest time Google has always gone with the rhetoric that any kind of social interaction on the internet do not factor into search rankings. However, what most of Google’s statements on this issue add up to is the fact that social interactions are not used to directly determine search rankings. This kind of statement only rules out direct relationships between social interactions and search rankings and does not rule out all possible connections between them.
Recently Google was granted a patent (US 2016/0246789 A1 to be exact) with the title, “Searching Content of Prominent Users in Social Networks.” This patent relates to what we have discussed in CS2850 with regard to ranking and how web searches provide the results that they do. Essentially what the patent does (this is summarized in the patent’s abstract) is that when a user of a search engine searches for something, the search engine will adjust the results based on the user’s social connections, and in turn these results can internally change the search terms in order to provide results consistent with both the original and adjusted search terms. According to the patent, the social connections that Google would be looking at would mostly be what friends or other connection of the user were talking about, and use these topics as the adjustments for the search. Basically, with this use of social connections to modify search results, a user is most likely to see resources that people with whom they are socially connected have seen. Links that have been circling through certain circles of people will then be more likely to be distributed to those connected to those within the circle, which will increase the popularity of these links, which will in turn then increase the amount that they are spread (this relates to the scores of the hubs and authorities that we discussed in class).
It is important to remember that just because the patent exists this does mean that Google must implement this social effect on web search rankings. A patent does not guarantee anything, but it seems likely that Google will be implementing programs along these lines in the near future if they have not already done so.
Exploring a newly granted Google patent around social signals